One of the things that is hard to convey to many people is how bias actually affects things. So I’ll offer a unique perspective, one that involves hamburgers.

All good stories should have a good burger of some sort, whatever your meat or lack of meat allows for. Some people will see ‘burger’ and go for the default of beef in their head, some people will think chicken or turkey or lamb or mushroom or… that right there is a bias.

I’ll go a bit further.

My father, well into his 50s, felt like having a hamburger and I asked him why we didn’t just make them instead of going out and buying some crappy burgers. He admitted something that floored me.

He didn’t know how to make them. Here he was, having lived decades eating burgers, but he never learned how to make burger patties. My father. The guy who always seemed within 10 feet of a burger joint when it came to feeding times.

Now, why was that?

First, he grew up in a Hindu home, and beef was not on the menu at home. He never would have been exposed in that household on how to make a beef patty – or a beef anything, for that matter. So he had an implicit bias from the start on not knowing how to make a hamburger.

He did, according to his oral history, like eating hamburgers, and would go to a place near his school to eat some. His eyes would glow when he discussed that memory, as simple as it might be.

Now, he also got married in the 1970s in the U.S., and Mom handled all the cooking. We cooked burgers there, but he managed to not learn about making the patties. He worked night shift, and so he wasn’t around most of the day anyway. More bias on him not learning how to make a hamburger, which an American of his generation generally considers an art form – but he was not American. More bias.

After decades, he assumed that learning how to make them was beyond him – which seemed peculiar considering how much time and care he would put into an omelette.

If my father were an AI of some sort and you asked him about how to make a beef patty, he would have likely said, “they come in stores.” While not knowing how to make burger patties is a pretty low threshold when compared to human extinction– it’s not hard to see how omitting information can be a handicap and create a bias.

It’s also not hard to see that by creating information or perspectives can also create bias. If we don’t teach AI about weight loss, an AI might suggest amputation for someone wondering how to lose weight – and even recommend low weight prosthetics. Ridiculous, but we never thought kids would be eating tide pods. We don’t exactly have as high a threshold as we might like to think.

There are good and bad biases, and they’re largely subjective. We see systemic biases now over all sorts of things – can you imagine them happening faster and more efficiently?

Aside from the large sweeping biases of culture, the artificial construct of race, and the availability of information, what other biases do you think can impact an artificial intelligence? Social media? Beyond?